Ficino's commentaries on Plato remained the standard guide to the Greek philosopher's works for centuries, Vanhaelen's new translation of Ficino's vast commentary on the Parmenides makes this monument of Renaissance metaphysics accessible to the modern student of philosophy. The volume contains the first critical edition of the Latin text, an ample introduction, and extensive notes.

Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457) was the leading philologist of the first half of the fifteenth century, as well as a philosopher, theologian, and translator. His extant Latin letters are fewer than those of many of his contemporaries, since he never collected or consciously preserved them. For that reason they afford a direct and unguarded window into the working life of the most passionate, difficult, and interestingof the Italian humanists. They show him as a teacher and secretary, but above all as a writer who continually worked and reworked his major contributions to dialectic and philology, notably his masterpiece on the Elecanges of the Latin Language, a central text of the Renaissance. More plentiful are the letters of others to him, which place him at the center of a humanist network that extended from Venice to Naples. They also shed light on the furious polemics in which he involved himself. Thes letters, including on previously unpublished, are now edited for the first time alongside Valla's own correspondence. The translation is the first into any modern language.

Dialectical Disputations, translated here for the first time into any modern language, is his principal contribution to the philosophy of language and logic. Volume 2 contains Books II-III, in which Valla refutes Aristotle's logical works on propositions, topics, and the syllogistic.